During her operation, Celia Barbour's surgeon made an almost fatal error, one with long-term consequences on her health. He apologized for it profusely—should that be enough?

The first thing my surgeon said to me after I came to in the ICU was that I needed to get better in a hurry so that I could beat him up for what he'd done to me.

I didn't really know what he was talking about, but I offered, weakly, to strangle him with my IV lines instead.

Dr. P looked tired. He was sitting in a chair by the foot of my bed, and he reached out and put his hand on my ankle and said, "I'm so sorry I did this to you."

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I didn't have enough energy to ask what "this" was, so I just smiled. The previous night, recovering from surgery in a drab hospital room, I'd drifted into a foggy delirium, interrupted by spasms of violent pain. My temperature dropped to 93 degrees, my blood pressure went haywire, and I sweated through two hospital gowns before a group of doctors found me semiconscious on their morning rounds. One of them stuck a needle in my chest, didn't like what came out, and minutes later hustled me into emergency surgery. When it was over, I had nine different tubes attached to my body.

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What had gone wrong? Later that day, Dr. P told me he'd nicked a vein during surgery, causing blood to drip into my chest cavity until nearly a gallon had collected there, compressing my lung.

When I came home from the hospital, my husband, Peter, wondered aloud how close I'd come to dying that night. I had no idea, so I decided to look it up. It turns out the loss of 40 percent of your blood is usually fatal. I'd lost nearly 60 percent.

"Close," I told him.

I initially went to the hospital to have an upper rib removed that was pressing against my collarbone when I swam, pinching a vein that passes between them. This had caused a blood clot to form one morning when I was doing laps, making my right arm turn bluish-red, swollen, and, alarmingly, limp.

The surgeon, Dr. P, told me he'd seen the condition before in people who frequently use their arms in an extended position—baseball pitchers, straphangers, swimmers. He was confident he could fix it: flush out the clot, then remove the rib, so the vein wouldn't be squeezed. He'd done the operation more than 50 times. It was challenging, he said, and I'd have to stay in the hospital one night, maybe two, but it was one of his specialties.

In the end, I was hospitalized for 11 days, including six in the ICU. I had four surgeries in all. The word lawsuit was uttered regularly by friends who came to visit. Each time, I dismissed it. "I'm not going to sue," I'd say. "He apologized." Some thought I was being naive or, worse, duped ("He's probably high-fiving his colleagues right now," one said), but that's not how it seemed. I believed he felt genuinely sorry for what he did.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who's moved by contrition. In a 2010 study in The Annals of Internal Medicine, malpractice actions against two hospitals dropped by nearly two thirds when doctors were encouraged to fess up to their mistakes.

It's an astonishing notion: that a malpractice suit—an enormous, exhausting undertaking that requires four- to six-year reserves of anger, money, and sheer will, and often seeks millions of dollars in damages—could be stopped in its tracks by a few common words.

"Patients are remarkably forgiving," says Marty Makary, MD, a surgeon at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and author of Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care. "When doctors are honest and open, even about a mistake, it can actually increase patient satisfaction."

I won't say that I'm more satisfied than I'd be had I had flawless surgery at the hands of a coldhearted martinet. But I do know this: A big part of the terror I felt as I checked in at the hospital, removed every last piece of clothing and jewelry—even my wedding ring—and tied on an overwashed, one-size-fits-all hospital gown was a kind of sickening, existential dread of becoming a mere body to the team of people gathering in the operating room to cut me open.

Not one of them could see in my blood how much I adore my kids and husband. None would read in my bones the words I still dreamed of writing, or know from my muscles the memories gathered there. Except—maybe—Dr. P, with whom I'd talked a few times beforehand.

Surgeons have famously outsize egos. But when Dr. P showed up in my recovery room, his first words were humble, human ones rather than medical jargon. After apologizing, he told me that he'd talked to Peter, who was on his way to the hospital, and that my kids were okay—my mom was going to stay with them. Our conversation reassured me that he understood his mistake had left scars not just on my arm, armpit, and rib cage, but on my life and my family's.

It also restored to me a measure of control—at least symbolically. By apologizing, he was giving me the power to choose whether to forgive him. Indeed, whenever people harm others, they've to some degree assumed and abused power over them. An apology tips the balance back toward the injured party. As such, it's an act of profound respect.

But to be effective, an apology has to be sincere—and that can get tricky. In his book On Apology, psychiatrist Aaron Lazare examines factors that distinguish real from false apologies. One is that they assume responsibility for the harm. "I made a mistake" is vastly different from "Mistakes were made," which disowns culpability. Even worse is the "I'm sorry you feel mad/bad about what happened" version. It implies that only through the (distorted) lens of the intended recipient's feelings did an error occur. It is an insult.

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A genuine apology, meanwhile, affirms that you and the perpetrator share the same values. This matters even for minor slights, like when someone steps on your toe. If the person stops, apologizes, and asks if you're okay, he's essentially saying that you both agree that what he did was wrong—that he's on your side. If he simply walks off, however, you might be left seething. Ignoring, glossing over, or downplaying a mistake can feel more demeaning than the mistake itself.

One of my visitors in the hospital was my ob-gyn, who also practices there. I was surprised and happy when he stopped by. We chatted, then he asked what happened. I began to explain—the clot, the rib. When I got to the part in which Dr. P nicked my vein, my ob-gyn nervously cut me off. "You mean complications occurred," he insisted vigorously. "Complications can happen with any surgery."

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I was stunned. I probably shouldn't have been; physicians are trained by insurers and hospital administrators never to apologize, for fear of inviting a malpractice suit. Still, Dr. P had already admitted his error. And he never once tried to brush it off as "complications."

In fact, his apology was the first of many things he did to convince me that he felt responsible for me. He texted me often once I was home to see how I was doing. He responded quickly to my smallest questions, even on weekends. And he canceled my bills. By which I mean: He charged me nothing. (Though the hospital and various others who worked on my case still did charge me. Quite a lot.)

All the same, I contacted a few lawyers once I was up and about. One told me within minutes that I should never, ever mention in an e-mail or text that I was feeling okay, getting better, or any such thing. "They'll use it against you," he said ominously. "You have no idea how ruthless they can be." By "they" he meant the hospital's lawyers—though I couldn't help but think that the ruthlessness he was referring to was also his own.

Judy Livingston and Thomas Moore, a married couple who are partners in a prestigious New York City malpractice firm, see the world in slightly less paranoid terms. "There may well be malpractice here," said Moore, with avuncular concern. "I would not trust your surgeon's information," added Livingston. "You're probably not getting straight answers. I mean, as wonderful perhaps as he was in saying sorry, there's this whole series of things that was done wrong for you."

She's right about that. The fact is, I don't have a complete picture of what happened. I've requested my medical records and operation reports but have yet to receive them from the hospital.

I even took Dr. P to lunch to ask him to explain more fully why I bled. To my surprise, his story had changed. "You said you'd nicked a vein," I reminded him.

"I didn't nick a vein," he said. "The vein didn't bleed the first two days."

"So what happened?"

"I still don't know. Either the vein tore or ripped or got caught on something. I've examined every single minute of what happened to you that day. I went over it and over it and over it…. I mean, it happened because of me."

"Were you the only one in there?" I asked.

"Yeah. It was me. I must have done something. But why did it happen two days later and not right then and there?"

He also told me that he's been sued four times in his 14 years as a surgeon—he said "only" four, but it sounded like a lot to me—but that he also performs more operations than most doctors (the second most in his hospital), as well as more dangerous ones. Curious about his record, I compared it with the data in a 2011 study in The New England Journal of Medicine: Cardiovascular surgery specialists like Dr. P are the second most frequently sued of all MDs (neurosurgeons are first); nearly 20 percent face a lawsuit every year.

"So, relative to the number of errors you've committed, do you think you're sued less than other doctors?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Because of your manner?"

"Yes." He paused. "But not because I'm a good actor. I'm a regular guy. Doctors forget that just because you have an MD beside your name, you don't have the right to be a jerk or an asshole, to be abrasive or condescending. All you have is that you've studied something that they haven't studied. And that's it."

So is he trying to cover something up? And if he is, why would he tell me point-blank that his human touch is what has helped him avoid lawsuits?

A 2010 New England Journal of Medicine study reported that up to 25 percent of patients are harmed by medical mistakes. Based on his experience, Makary says that at least 2 percent of doctors are dangerously inept because of addiction and mental health issues, but he thinks that figure drastically underestimates the overall level of physician incompetence. Because there's usually no way to get rid of bad doctors—one hospital can dump them, but they just move elsewhere—the courts have been the public's sole recourse, and the only form of accountability in the medical system. "When I travel to countries where doctors can't be sued," said Makary, "the care is even more highly variable." Sometimes justice is meted out in other ways. "In China, they don't really have a right to sue; what they have is a rash of stabbings of doctors," he said.

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Still, lawsuits target random errors, and their outcomes are often kept secret, meaning that they're hardly the most effective means to improve medicine. It's an odd fact of our era that although we can research the smallest particulars about symptoms and ailments online, we still can't find out much at all about our doctors: How many times has she done the procedure we're seeking? What percentage of patients have positive outcomes? How often have MDs been sued?

The availability of hard data varies by state, but you can get more information shopping for a car or refrigerator than you can a doctor. In New York, where I live, we supposedly have a fairly transparent system. Dr. P's profile on the state Department of Health website assured me that he has no hospital privilege restrictions, no out-of-state actions—and no malpractice suits.

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Even he admitted more than that.

Does that mean patients have no choice but to grill their doctors? If so, I'm not sure I could have done it in time. When the initial clot appeared, I was told I had just two weeks to decide whether to have it removed—after that, it would harden and become inoperable. (Alternatively, I could've skipped surgery and hoped that blood thinners would dissolve it.) I did my best to research Dr. P in that short, panic-filled time. I asked him lots of questions, but not so many as to come off as difficult; I was scared of being disliked by the person who might soon have my life in his hands. I googled him and checked out his ratings on Yelp. I looked him up in those magazine guides to top doctors. But none gave me much beyond the most perfunctory of details. So I went with my gut. From the get-go, I liked Dr. P's mixture of cockiness and warmth. It put me at ease.

In the aftermath of my botched procedure, I found myself thinking that choosing a surgeon is a bit like choosing a boyfriend. Based on little more than instinct, you hand over jurisdiction of your body to one, your feelings to the other. Then if, say, the boyfriend cheats or leaves you, you feel furious at him, of course. But you're also angry at yourself for falling for him: Did you trust the wrong guy, choose him for the wrong reasons?

I've wondered all this about Dr. P—was I incredibly gullible? But as the weeks wore on, I got to a point where I didn't care; I just wanted to put it behind me. Makary, for one, has seen this happen repeatedly: If a patient isn't severely, permanently damaged by a medical mishap, it's often easier to move on than to relive the trauma of the experience.

But then, less than two months after I left the hospital, another clot formed, at the spot in my vein where Dr. P had inserted a stent during the emergency procedure to stop me from bleeding to death. Doctors theorize that the stent likely caused turbulence in the vein—I picture it like a pebble in a stream that makes the water ripple, causing silt to collect.

So now I've got a clot, just like I did the first day I walked into Dr. P's office. My right arm often gets achy and swollen when I use it, because the clot blocks the blood from draining effectively. In addition, my upper arm is numb because nerves were cut during surgery. The scars in my chest wall hurt when I take a deep breath. A surgery to remove this clot isn't an option, I've been told, so I inject myself with blood thinners each night, which leaves my stomach mottled with bruises. I face the possibility of lifelong damage from the blood thinners, and who knows what from the blood transfusions. And I have less money in the bank to cover it all.

Most of the time, I actually feel okay about this. I'm alive, and I can write and cook and hug my children. But whenever I try to swim, my heart wants to break. Swimming, especially in clear New England lakes, was once among my greatest joys—I felt so free and sleek, slipping through the water like a silvery fish. But whereas I used to swim a mile or more at a time, now I can manage maybe 15 strokes before my arm feels limp, and I roll over onto my back and float awhile.

In light of all this, is Dr. P's apology still enough? Sometimes yes. Often no.

But nothing—not a $10 million settlement nor 10 million more apologies—will give me back the full use of my arm. So I have to reconcile myself to the body I'll be spending the rest of my life with. And maybe, in the end, knowing that the harm was done under the care of a physician who doesn't pretend to be anything other than a fallible human being will help me make peace with that.

I've been damaged. Haven't we all? It's a risk we face whenever we turn to another person for help.